Anadarko’s 62 percent jump in the Eagle Ford

The South Texas numbers keep improving for Anadarko Petroleum Corp., which is selling about 32,000 barrels per day of crude oil and natural gas liquids from its Eagle Ford Shale operations – a 62 percent increase over the same time last year.

The company, which this week reported its second-quarter earnings, also has started operations at its Brasada natural gas processing plant near Cotulla in La Salle County.

The plant separates natural gas liquids — methane, ethane, propane and butane — and has the capacity to process 200 million cubic feet of gas per day.

Anadarko holds about 400,000 acres in Dimmit, La Salle, Maverick and Webb counties, where natural gas liquids are abundant. All the company’s acreage sits to the west of the Cotulla plant, and a pipeline network both brings the natural gas into the facility and moves it off site to market.

“This has been central to our drilling and economic success in the Eagleford as takeaway has been an industry challenge that our company has done a great job managing,” R. A. Walker, chairman, CEO and president of Anadarko, said in a call with analysts this week.

In May, Frank Patterson, Anadarko’s vice president of exploration, at the 2013 UBS Global Oil and Gas conference said the company continues to see big growth in the Eagle Ford. “… it basically was nothing a few years ago, and now it’s one of our major fields in the company,” Patterson said. “This is really an incredible story, the ramp up of the Eagleford, and it continues to ramp up.”

You can read a full transcript of Anadarko’s second-quarter call with analysts here on SeekingAlpha, which has free registration.